Poetry

If no one in my family ever spoke of it, if no one handed down? what it was to be born to power and married in a poor country. If no one wanted to remember? the noise of the redcoats cantering? in lanes bleached with apple flowers? on an April morning. If no one ever…

In Donegal we climbed over a cow gate, crossed through a field among hooded crows and earth smells, climbed a stile and stepped onto rain-mucked ground, to enter a small grotto where a stone St. Columba was surrounded by a yellow cigarette lighter, a key ring with green gremlin, a rain-swollen missal, a toy train,…

The better the book, the more of us it reads. Even as I look away, words float? across a world I never knew was there. Page after page, I feel the light wind? breathe a little sense into things.? Why would it be any different with you. I knew a man once who had one…

It makes me think of my other life, this minor chord from the room above, when it’s been within hearing—no, closer: moments when, if I stepped a certain way, or put out my hand… Mist this morning over the ball field. Maybe I am turning into a cloud. Last night I left my coat over…

“I hate Ladytown—so much can go wrong down there.” —Steph Things weren’t looking good in Ladytown. True, it was always lush, like D.C. in August, high humidity, but that year the very brickwork sweated salt. That year the Metro chafed the tunnel walls and the train whistles’ wail rose to a new pitch of dismay,…

Note the surface that surrounds the word, and how unlike its meaning, which you step over to avoid, the word raised and touchable. Pitted prune, eaten bone, hay in a muddy yard. Let exist and me see them all: paint in a locker room; rubber garden hose washer; disease displayed on a rosebush leaf; a…

A run-down hall of echoes. Shout your name,? You will hear it again, from generations? Gone before you . . . The souls they have become By the million, look at them, transmigrating Out of Europe, dragging sailors’ trunks? Aboard the Pullmans—conscious of rank, Edwardian . . . There they go, to break the bank…

If your dream comes to life and the houses on our street lift themselves up and walk off on their leggy stilts and find different roosts before you come home from school, I will meet you at the spot in case of fire under the dying pine—whose roots are not legs. But promise me: if…

Out on the shine off the street there is the reflection of the coming bustle of dawn, of plastic and bolted steel, neon and industry caught in the asphalt. And as the grass sweats—the groan of machinery echoing off masonry—the dust rises, sewing itself in the fat of trees, shining the faces of men in…